Circle opens doors to global audience | Hacker News Reader

Circle opens doors to global audience

circle.com

73 pointsepaga58 comments

If I can measure your priorities by viewing your site, it appears that your #1 priority is a certain look-and-feel (as dabeeeenster put it "photos of hot 19 year old girls on a beach"). Along these lines, you have also purchased "circle.com" - do you read Dave Eggers too?

Your #2 priority must be investment, since the "Management", "Board", and "Investors" sections of the site are the only ones that contain any actual information.[1] You have some impressive backers and impressive funding. In my experience, companies that are more excited about how much funding they have raised are less likely to succeed than companies that are excited about the product they are building.

To sum it up: I am unimpressed.

[1] - Learning that you are "excited about bitcoin" isn't information. Because of that excitement have you decided to offer bank accounts denominated in bitcoin? To offer a tool allowing merchants to accept bitcoin for daily purchases? To create a new offering that will supplant bitcoin? Look -- we're ALL "excited" about bitcoin: it's an interesting innovation. Being excited about it isn't news.

If you really want to understand how excited Jeremy Allaire (CEO of Circle) is about Bitcoin, I suggest you read the testimony he gave at the US Senate hearing on Bitcoin in November 2013. He was 1 of the 7 witnesses invited to testify: http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/download/?id=2369099f-b70d-42e2-...

I do agree though that the Circle.com website is vague. What they offer as of today is buying and selling bitcoins. I believe the website is vague because the company has multiple other products coming down the line (some speculation: payment processing like BitPay, a Bitcoin-backed credit card, etc) and Circle does not want to advertise itself as a Bitcoin-exchange-and-nothing-else company. From what I have heard from Allaire in the past year, they don't even seem to want to restrict themselves to the Bitcoin currency, but may work with alternate crypto currencies in the future. So how could they advertise themselves? "Crypto currency service provider"? The general public does not know what a crypto currency is. "Digital currency service provider"? This sounds almost as bad.

Amazon did an excellent job of this. They advertised themselves as an online bookstore. Then they began selling other items. They had the idea of selling everything, but they marketed themselves as a bookstore then branched out.

Dave Eggers was my first thought when I saw the domain as well. I wondered from the brand whether it was some sort of promotional tie-in with the book (which I haven't read). After observing the so-hip-it's parody design and signup form in lieu of an explanation of what the site actually does, I concluded that was the most likely purpose behind the site.

This homepage is fucking terrible. HOW CAN I USE YOUR PRODUCT? What do I need? Credit card? Bitcoin address? Fiat bank account? PayPal?

Is it a joke? "We believe in intuitive design and excellent customer support"! A design so intuitive I have no fucking idea what the hell is going on. Oh but you have some big depth of field photos of hot 19 year old girls on a beach. Brilliant.

Just tell me in 1 sentence what you do. And it should be in the damn h1 tag. As it is it's not on the site at all.

from their site it's obvious what circle is: bitcoin for hip young white people

But it just says at the bottom:

WHY BITCOIN? Bitcoin is a secure, global form of digital money. Brilliant minds developed and support it. People around the world use it. It provides a foundation for technologies that make money more powerful every day. The future of money begins with Bitcoin.

So that tells me precisely nothing.

marketing 101 correction. they want to sell bitcoins to people that feel good identifying as rich hip young white people.

Have you considered that engaging customers on an emotional level might be more effective than doing so in a utilitarian way?

I don't think one sentence is too much to ask, I hit the back button because I couldn't figure out what their product did within a short amount of time.

You can't be serious?

Marketers do it all the time, it's a key component of most advertising and marketing campaigns. Still though, this site doesn't even execute that well.

First: interesting company and concept. I would love to see this go further, will be keeping my eye on it.

Second: who's idea was it to implement that wretched parallax effect on their homepage? Not only is it a tawdry but it gives me vertigo which is usually a rare experience on the modern web and has thus-far created a very negative experience for me. I stopped looking at the homepage and just read the wikipedia article on the company instead so my eyes wouldn't hurt.

Ditto on the vertigo. Shocking to think this effect was deliberate.

Also, I'm not sure what pictures of young people (at a cottage?) has to do with their product.

Unfortunately the parallax effect is choppy on anything but Chrome for me on Mac.

It's smooth for me (Chrome on Ubuntu) but it's still a maddening design choice.

Less marketing jargon, more actual content. What I find particularly fascinating is that bitcoin is mentioned a bunch of times passively without anyone ever saying "this is a bitcoin bank". It's like your supposed to just intuit the function of the site from a bunch of vague adjectives and adverbs like "everywhere" and "instant".

I'm afraid people (regular people - not the HN following sort of people) are going to start getting confused between all the Circles and Squares and Stripes and so on.

In the infancy of the following brands, would you be able to derive the function of the company from its name?:

Barnes and Noble

Ben and Jerry's

Black and Decker

Briggs and Stratton

Look, branding has trends. This is nothing new and has not negatively affected any of these brands.

Circle so far elucidates nothing of a product on this, it's shop front. Barnes & Nobel had a window full of books.

McDonalds. KFC.

:) Just gotta say it - KFC is a bad example here.

It stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is pretty much exactly their product.

Not any more! They abandoned that name for several reasons - the state of Kentucky enforced their name as a trademark, plus 'Fried' became a bad word. So now they're just 'KFC'

That's a better description than the Art Director at one Digital Agency who explained that the reason for the name change to KFC was because "they weren't allowed to call it 'chicken' anymore."

So FWIW, the thing about the state of Kentucky isn't true. It's listed in 'The Repository of Lost Legends' on Snopes, which is their section of made up stuff.

I'm only mentioning this as I didn't realise for a very long time that the T.R.O.L.L. (now it should make sense) was all made up and I had a tendency to quote that section a lot.

I hope you haven't spent as many years believing that section as I did :)

Sure, but they're KFC because everybody knows what the letters stand for. Circle, I can't figure out what they're trying to sell me.

Meh. The word "Target" doesn't really carry any signal about what that company actually does. Ask yourself, in Target's infancy, did the name hurt or help them? I'd guess it had very little to do with their eventual outcome.

Great! Finally companies will have an incentive to give themselves sensible names.

This makes bitcoin very accessible. Sign up, buy bitcoins with a credit card instantly. Exactly what everybody has been asking for.

Congrats, you came up with a better tagline on a whim than anyone in their entire company.

That should be the headline for the page. And put all the marketing mumbo jumbo that only appeals to VCs lower down.

"Starting today, people can onboard into a Circle account and begin using digital money..."

That sounds weird to me. I am not a native speaker of English, though. Is this normal usage?

Googling for "onboard into" gives me headlines that do make sense to me:

"Step onboard into history! - TripAdvisor"

"Bus plunges with two babies onboard into trench — Guyana"

"@KLM Is it possible to take crutches onboard into the cabin"

Do people "onboard into", say, bank accounts?

"onboarding" has become somewhat of a UX term. It refers to the process of taking a non-customer and turning them into a customer that understands and can use the product.

There's actually a website that gives examples of different company's "onboarding" experiences: http://www.useronboard.com/

That may well be. For me, it sounded like an HR (human resources dept) term: "employee on-boarding" (something that sounds like employee water-boarding but not as bad).

US bank cards only ? This is "global" in the "World Series" sense of the word, for the moment.

I just tried it out with a credit card issued by a European Bank and it works flawlessly. Very painless process to buy bitcoins instantly.

It works in all countries with credit/debit cards (although some countries are reporting problems; argentina). Non-USA cards will be charged a 2.9% fee from VISA & Mastercard. Some cards appear not to work, some people are reporting Visa doesn't work but their mastercard does and visa versa.

Prepaid cards, atleast when I tried them, don't work.

> US bank cards only

source?

Most credit/debit cards globally, mostly US bank accounts only.

> You must be an individual of at least 13 years of age who resides in the United States to enter into this Agreement.

So the insurance policy only applies to USA customers, that's why it's not a huge risk for them as they are targetting a global audience.

They should allow webmasters to redirect too the send page with a URL like "https://www.circle.com/send?cost=5&to=1PbiuKqC8L4nsgdkaWwvFH... so then websites can accept bitcoin easily whilst having a high conversion rate due to the simplicity Circle provides (in comparison to redirecting them to Bitpay which would complicate the process for first time bitcoiners).

Viewed from the UK, the user agreement says "You must be an individual of at least 13 years of age and not reside in the United States to enter into this Agreement." and also agrees to provide insurance

The website says that it is both free ("We don't charge fees when you convert funds to or from bitcoin with a linked bank account, when you store your bitcoin, or for bitcoin transactions.") AND insured ("All of the money in your Circle account is insured at no cost to you."). I am not sure how that will work out for them; given the short and eventful history of BC, I would assume that insurance charges would be quite steep.

But then: I seem to recall many money changers at airports also advertising "zero conversion charges", and they seem to be doing just fine even while paying (what must be) high rents for their spots. So perhaps there is a revenue model there which I can't suss out.

if they follow you example, they will just convert "without fees" but using their much more expensive coversion rate

This. Their revenue model is screwing you over relative to the exchange rate with massive buy/sell spreads.

Wrong. Buy/sell spread is zero, research before you speak.

If you click on News there are links to download a 2.7 MB archive of Circle logos in various shapes and sizes and a 36 MB (that's thirty-six megabytes) headshot of Circle's CEO.

I have no idea what Circle does but I do know it's run by an egomaniac.

They remind me of this bunch of chancers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn

I am going to sign up in hopes that these hot girls on beaches will flock to me.

Mixed content (http vs https) on your site - how should we as possible clients trust a financial company who can't manage their content properly?

EDIT: and the eye candies on the front page gives me eye cancer. Seriously.

The homepage is almost completely unusable on firefox on OS X. The scrolling is jerky as hell, things pop in and out seemingly at random and the whole feel is so broken and terrible that I was so distracted by it that I didn't actually read any of the content.

It's even worse that on pages completely devoid of moving content and general broken js, the scrolling is still awful any time you get near the big picture in the footer.

A big picture, I might add, which has absolutely nothing to do with what I am guessing from hn comments is the actual point of the site.

Not a good sign when https://www.circle.com shows up as a blank page.

EDIT: OK, it shows up now. I am still just as unclear on what the product is.

https://www.circle.com/user-agreement and https://www.circle.com/user-agreement still appear to be empty though.

EDIT: Okay, I can see them now.

I know how the banks are gaining revenue on me, and I sleep safe knowing that they benefit from having me.

Your case - everything is free, are you going to use the bitcoin reserve, similar to banks? I am not buying the fluffy ponies story, hiding the revenue is just making you look suspicious.

My response:

"Now that you left me out of the early stuff, you can go and shove it."

Looks like it is throwing 503 right now. :/

This site should not be on the first page of HN.

A lot of people didn't understand exactly what is this product, including myself.

How retarded is this, first of all, reading through their privacy terms, I barfed a bit. The reason people buy fucking bitcoin is to stay anon, with Circle, practically everybody down to your grandmother in the 3rd knee know that you just purchased bitcoins.

Secondly, Circle, really? Was Square taken? I would prefer square.

It's like making money on the face of stupid people. Very original.

"The reason people buy fucking bitcoin is to stay anon"

That's just one reason that somebody might use bitcoin. There's plenty of others.

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